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Irwin Mitchell recently secured £4,500 for a Birmingham man who was exposed to excessive noise throughout his career, most of which without adequate ear protection. Our client was employed by Aeroplane & Motor Aluminium Castings Limited as a production worker at its premises on Wood Lane, Birmingham.

He worked at the site between 1963 and 1981, where the company manufactured cast aluminium parts for the motor and air industries.

His role involved carrying out fettling work to remove excess material on the cast parts and he was exposed to excessive levels of noise from the machinery and tools in the department where he worked, including linishers, grinding belts, band saws, deburring tools, milling machines and hand held chisel guns.

The company only introduced hearing protection in the later years of our client’s employment, meaning he worked many years being exposed to high levels of noise without such protection.

Our client began to notice that his hearing had reduced when family members would comment that he would frequently ask them to repeat themselves. At the time our client, who is now 70 years old, put his hearing problems down to getting older but when he went for a hearing test, he was told that the results indicated that his hearing had been damaged by noise.

Irwin Mitchell were approached to act on our client’s behalf in a claim for compensation against his former employer. He was represented by Mark Lennon, a solicitor in the workplace injury team in Birmingham who specialises in noise induced deafness cases.

Mark said: “I am very pleased to be able to secure compensation on my client’s behalf. It was a difficult case where the company no longer existed so there were problems in identifying the correct insurers and no documents relating to our client’s employment were retained.

"Ultimately, our client’s evidence, that he was exposed to noise for more than 20 years without hearing protection, was accepted and the company’s insurers agreed to settle his claim for compensation.”